Everything is Under Control

A memoir with recipes

Phyllis Grant

ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © Phyllis Grant 2020

Phyllis Grant asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © June 2020 ISBN: 9780008338992

Version 2020-06-02

Note to Readers

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For Matthew

… the rhythm will keep me awake, changing.

—ROBERT HASS

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Epigraph

Begin Reading

Recipes

Tart Dough

Tarte Tatin

Crème Fraîche

Balsamic Reduction

Jammy Tomato Anchovy Sauce

Pesto

Jalapeño Quick Pickles

Avocado Bowls With Garlic Anchovy Vinaigrette

Caramelized Onion Tart With Anchovies and Olives (Pissaladière)

Braised Chicken

Spicy Beef Stew

Lamb Popsicles

Hazelnut Butter Cookies

Grandma’s Fudgy Icebox Brownies

Vanilla Bean Custard Ice Cream

Strawberry Balsamic Tart

Cottage Cheese Pancakes

Acknowledgments

A Note About the Author

About the Publisher

Here, there is no intense heat.

I whack the cold dough with my rolling pin.

There is no Chef.

I lean all my weight into the flattened disc.

No dupes.

Roll, spin, quick flip, flour, exhale.

There is no judgment. No sweat. No VIPs.

My heart starts to race.

There are only my children, perched on stools, trying to control their eager hands, excited to fill their hungry bellies.

When my great-grandfather, on my mother’s side, dies of myasthenia gravis, his business partner takes everything and my great-grandmother falls into a year of anxiety and deep depression. She goes away to a sanatorium while her daughter, my grandmother Phyllis, lives with relatives.

My great-grandmother finally moves back home and takes two jobs in order to make ends meet. While she drives a school bus and works as an ophthalmologist’s assistant, my grandmother Phyllis is in charge of meals. There is no Hamburger Helper. No takeout. No frozen pizza. So she learns to cook. She is ten.

Wait. Assembly line. Please cut all the apples in half before you start peeling them.

But why, Mom? My son wants to do it his way.

My daughter eye-rolls in his direction. She understands. She keeps her closet color-coordinated and her socks in a neat little row.

She smiles. I smile back. And then I cut myself.

As my daughter wraps my finger in a Band-Aid, I tell my kids about how I used to cut myself several times a week when I worked in restaurants. Sometimes a little nick, sometimes a gushing wound that three Band-Aids and a finger cot could not contain. How I would squat down behind the lockers, my hand wrapped in a bloody apron, begging my finger to stop bleeding so I could get back to my station before the Chef saw that I was gone.

My son speed-climbs up onto my hip, charmingly invading my personal space in the way only a five-year-old can.

But why were you embarrassed?

I place him a safe distance away on the counter and nestle the sliced apples down into the hot sugar and butter.

Because I knew nothing, my love.

I wrap the dough up on the rolling pin and unroll it out over the apples, quickly tucking the edges down with a butter knife. My chest tightens and starts to ache.

But now you know everything.

I don’t correct him.

My grandmother Phyllis marries a painter who likes his gin, his Mozart, his cigarettes. And so does she. They settle in Berkeley, California, with their two kids, where she continues cooking the inexpensive comfort foods of her youth. Tough cuts of lamb become stew. Stale bread is for cheese toasts or croutons. Ham hock flavors a pot of split pea soup that lasts for days. Eggs are baked in ramekins or scrambled or turned into soufflés. There is no waste.

While there is a formality to things—napkin in your lap, no milk bottles on the table, don’t eat over the sink—the table is also the easiest place to be. No rushing. No shortcuts. Every meal counts.

My daughter opens the oven door. I slide in the tarte tatin. She goes back to her homework world. My son and I sit on the dirty floor in front of the oven and wait.

Mom, there’s a problem.

What?

Mom, I don’t think I can look at you and say what I’m thinking.

I pull him into my lap and cradle his impossibly long body, carefully covering his eyes with my hands. I feel his heart racing in his eyelids.

Mom, I don’t want to die.

Did you know that we all die?

No we don’t. Not the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus.

But they’re all crazy full of magic.

I just don’t know how it will feel to die.

He nuzzles his face in the crook of my arm, smearing dirt, snot, tears on my sleeve. We hold hands and rock.

My grandmother Elizabeth, on my father’s side, grows up in Minnesota with a mother who can create a meal out of a seemingly empty cupboard and a dairyman father who spends hours tending to his cheeses, coaxing and trimming with his special knife, storing them all in a dedicated refrigerator. Elizabeth’s brother is eighteen years older, so she lives the life of an only child. She teaches herself to paint.

Mom, when is the tarte tatin done?

When the puff pastry is light brown and firm and the caramel is bubbling like crazy.

Mom, that sounds dangerous.

My grandparents meet in a senator’s office in Washington, D.C. She is twenty-one. He is a thirty-year-old journalist from Dothan, Alabama, who chooses his words carefully, doesn’t suffer fools, and is incredibly proper. They raise my dad and his two siblings in Bethesda, Maryland, where my grandmother Elizabeth moves like a hummingbird, keeping their world house-tour beautiful. She is a reluctant cook who would much rather be painting or gardening or designing intricate tablescapes with white birds. The house is filled with politicians and neighbors and highballs and cheeseballs and shrimp hanging off crystal bowls. Dinner, which waits in the oven for the lengthy cocktail hour to wind down, is often a variation on a dish they call Super Supper Slush: canned beans, corn, and tomatoes casseroled and then baked until bubbling.

Dude, do you want to watch me flip the tarte tatin?

His face lights up.

As I invert it onto a cake plate, I splash hot caramel all over my hands, the table, the floor, my son’s shoes.

ShitcrapfuckIamsosorryareyouallrightIamsuchanidiotareyouallrightIcannotbelieveIdidthat.

Mom, I’m fine.

I jumped the gun.

You did what with a gun?

My parents meet in college. They share a love of music. They fight every day about the Vietnam War; my mom is full-bore against it. My father slowly comes around to her ways. They get married and move to the North Beach area of San Francisco, where my dad rides a motorcycle and my mom learns from the downstairs neighbors how to make whole-grain bread. Six flights up, they push my younger brother and me on a swing—through the fog, over a roof garden filled with herbs and citrus trees—precariously close to the edge.

My mom starts a catering company. My dad starts a management consulting company. Money is always tight. They buy a fixer-upper in Berkeley. On the weekend, my father is on his back fixing plumbing or hanging off the side of the house slowly shingling.

My mom goes back to school to study acting, so she teaches my dad the two things she thinks he needs to know to take over cooking dinner: the proportions for vinaigrette and how to roast chicken. Every night, while watching Walter Cronkite, he teaches himself to cook. He is thirty-five.

From then on, they cook together. Thanks to the Cuisinart, the bread maker, the pasta machine, Julia Child, and a garden of salad greens and parsley and lemons and avocados, there is a perpetual swirl of homemade fettuccini with butter and Parmesan, butter lettuce salads with shallot vinaigrette, glazed lemon cakes, and so much chicken.

When I am eleven years old, I lose fifteen pounds. Everyone looks for a reason. Blood tests, weekly weigh-ins, X-rays, intense parental discussions behind closed doors. It is 1981 and people aren’t talking about appetite, hormones, and the teenage brain. They rule out the big stuff like anorexia and brain tumors. All I know is I keep looking and I just can’t find any hunger in my body.

On weekend mornings, I bake. I bake to feed others. Danish ebelskiver, Belgian waffles, French toast, crêpes, chocolate chip cookies, bûches de Noël.

When I cook, I am calm. And confident. Baking works. You just follow the rules. There is comfort in the logic.

Often, in the middle of dinner, I slide down under the kitchen table and snuggle with the dog. As I listen to the muffled voices and clinking of glasses, my head gets all bubbly and blissful. I close my eyes and I am on a brightly lit stage pirouetting, suspending, leaping. I can’t stop choreographing dances in my head.

After a year, I start eating again. I am twelve.

My best friend and I sit on the kitchen counter, eating toasted presliced Colombo San Francisco sourdough, discussing our intersecting dreams of bigger sticker collections, kissing Han Solo, getting an apartment together in New York City, world peace. Each slice of toast drips with butter and my mom’s apricot jam. There is no such thing as being full.

Left leg up up up. Toes to the sky. I am fourteen, in my attic bedroom in front of the full-length mirror, surrounded by magazine cutouts of Rob Lowe, the Soloflex man, and all the actors from Fame. I slam down into a standing split. Over and over again.

I don’t see myself. I see only the dancer I want to become.

My mom and I get out of the cab at Ninety-Third and Broadway, stand on the sidewalk, and look seven flights up to my new home: a residence hotel filled with Juilliard students.

She walks into the apartment ahead of me and takes it all in. Stained rug. Bedroom windows facing an air shaft. No kitchen.

We decide that the top of a left-behind yellow dresser will be my kitchen counter. My mom opens a drawer and finds used syringes. She throws them in the trash without comment and takes me shopping for my first winter in New York City.

I sit down on the floor of Bloomingdale’s in an ocean of winter coats. They all look the same. It is 1988. There are lots of shoulder pads. I don’t know how to choose.

My mom picks out a black wool coat, a floral scarf, a whisk, two wooden spoons, a plastic spatula, a cheese grater, a hot plate, and a microwave.

We eat all over the city. Cheesecake and French fries and mesclun salads with goat cheese. Chocolate sundaes. Tiramisu. Sun-dried tomatoes are everywhere. Nothing is seasonal, everything is overpriced and oversize and overpackaged and over the top. We eat so we don’t have to acknowledge what’s coming next. But every time I look up, she confirms—with a gaze, a smile, an arm squeeze—that I am just where I need to be. And then I need to look away.

She flies back to Berkeley, leaving me in my kitchen-less one-bedroom apartment with a membership to the Museum of Modern Art and a book of her handwritten recipes.

We are so hungry.

We dance all day long. In the studios. In the stairwells. On the sofas in the lounge. Down Broadway. It is my childhood dream come to life. The New York City package: 1988 style. Dance school. Depressing apartment. Leg warmers. Straw basket bag like Coco on Fame.

There are no dorms. We don’t know how to cook. New York City is our cafeteria.

White onion, cheddar, and tomato omelets with French fries in fluorescent diners, all-you-can-eat barbecue ribs at Dallas BBQ, General Tso’s chicken with free white wine, Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream, banana muffins with inch-thick streusel, airy blueberry scones, Häagen-Dazs bars, Doritos, and Peanut M&M’s.

We don’t care what we eat. We just want to be full so we can do it all again the next day.

My nightly soundtrack is made up of car alarms, a hissing radiator, and the frantic inhales and exhales of my assigned roommate trying to climb the walls. Several times a week, she puts in a James Taylor tape and run run run slams her naked body against the wall, her hands and feet clawing at the chipped paint, sobbing as her body slides to the ground.

I meet her older brother. He asks me to watch out for his baby sister.

She tiptoes down the street as if she is walking on air, smiling hard at everyone, engaging strangers in conversations about the beautiful day, her light blue eyes brimming with tears, her ecstatic bliss changing midsentence to deep gloom.

She buys a folding shopping cart at Bed Bath & Beyond that she pushes up and down Broadway. She bursts through the door with a new collection of gathered items: a broken lamp, three packages of stale Mint Milanos for the price of one, a man she met at Tasti D-Lite frozen yogurt shop.

I shake her awake every day. I feed her granola. I tuck the hair behind her ears.

My ballet teacher squeezes my waist. He trained with Rudolf Nureyev and wears a cape that he flips back when he’s angry. He smacks my ass with a stick.

Stop eating so many croissants, Phyllis.

He says I have an attitude problem. He would like me to disappear.

We share a bathroom with a famous ballet school, I listen to the heaving in the stalls. I watch girls erase their femininity, their fertility.

I learn the tricks.

A stick of Juicy Fruit gum is ten calories and if you chew it for over an hour, you will burn eleven calories.

Bulimia is much harder to cover up. It’s loud and messy. But you get to eat more. Anorexia is clean and requires control.

I choose anorexia.

Breakfast is coffee and a cigarette. Lunch is a cigarette. Dinner is broth.

I think I’m in control. I hear the words I want to hear: You look great, Phyllis. Look at the line in your penché. You finally have a waist.

I audition for the big performance at the Juilliard Theater. I don’t even get cast as an understudy. I almost get cut in my first evaluation. So I ask why.

We saw a lot of potential in you but you haven’t lived up to it. Your technique is very weak and we’re not sure you’re going to make it here at Juilliard.

I go to the Juilliard Halloween party. Alcohol hits my empty stomach. I don’t remember getting carried out of the school and ten blocks up Broadway to my apartment. I don’t remember how I get out of the tight green dress. I do remember waking up as my head slams the side of the bathtub, my body slumping to the tile floor.

Head down, purse pulled into body, face emotionally sealed, I move with the anonymous throngs up and down Broadway. I find a speed I never knew I had. I walk for distraction. I walk to try to understand what to do. I walk to try to figure out who I am. I am eighteen.

I visit every church, temple, mosque on the Upper West Side that will let me in. I breathe in the religious air. It feels thick, cool, supportive. It smells musty but sweet like my grandmother Elizabeth’s garage. I pretend to believe in God by listening to the music, planting my feet on the cement floor, holding a Bible to my chest.

I peer into brownstones. I want to sit at those kitchen tables. I want to be fed. I buy a box of cake mix and make it in my microwave. To watch it rise. For the smell. To feel the warmth of just-baked anything in my hands.

Why don’t you take your clothes off, Phyllis. Yes. Like that. Nice. And now do the splits. Beautiful. Let me photograph you from the other side. Hold on. Wow. I am so grateful to you. These photos will be so helpful. Now cup your breasts. Yes. That’s it. Yes.

I am not the only Juilliard dancer who goes downtown to the Puck Building to have her picture taken in the anatomy teacher’s special studio for his extracurricular project. None of us tell. We don’t want to ruin his life.

My mother sends me newspaper clippings. Where to get the best tea. Lists of the best New York City restaurants. Farmers’ market locations. Thanksgiving hotline numbers. Turkey cooking tips are highlighted: You need half a cup of stuffing for each pound of bird. Safety tips are circled: Thyme has been shown to be active against salmonella. How I need to check my turkey after two and a quarter hours. How much she will miss me at Thanksgiving this year. How my brother is growing an inch a week. How much she loves me.

But my first Thanksgiving away from home isn’t in a home kitchen. It is a prix fixe dinner at Windows on the World at the top of One World Trade Center. Three young women. Three bottles of wine. Three courses consisting of gelatinous corn chowder, dry turkey with mucousy gravy, leaden apple pie. Two out of the three of us throw it all up in the fancy bathroom. Before we leave, I stand at the floor-to-ceiling windows, tracing the avenue lights straight back uptown to my new home. Here, 100 blocks south and 107 floors up, I am relieved to be so far away from it all.

I’m fine, Daddy. Everything is fine. I love you too.

I hang up the pay phone outside my apartment building, step over a homeless man, walk past the bullet hole in the lobby door, and take the stairs. A few flights up, I sit down. The stairwell stinks of piss and misery. The building around me vibrates with Bach, Madonna, and laughter.

I don’t want what I thought I wanted. I don’t want to decide what to eat. I don’t want to be set free.

I light a cigarette and inhale menthol smoke as often and as deeply as one cigarette will allow, all for that two-second dopamine buzz that makes space in my brain for the belief that life won’t always feel like this.

I am a very good dancer. But I will never be a great one.

All I want is to go home and eat my mom’s roast chicken.

It’s small. It’s filled with roaches. It’s coated with the stink and stickiness of the previous ten tenants. But it’s mine. My first kitchen. With a gas stovetop and an oven with a broiler drawer. The freezer has a two-inch border of ice but it’s big enough for two pints of ice cream for my new roommate and me. I have a place to collect condiments. I buy a dish towel and an apron. I open my mom’s recipe book and follow her cursive through the chopping of the onion, the toasting of the rice, the never ever lifting of the lid until the timer goes off. I end up with a pot of brown rice. Her words work.

An actor or a stockbroker or a film director sits across from me at a diner or a bar or on a park bench reciting his overused script of it’s so nice to be out with a beautiful girl, you are so different, so special, so cultured. And off we go to watch a foreign film or see an art exhibit at the Whitney or visit his favorite drama bookstore. We end up back at his teeny tiny apartment or black marble penthouse or West Side brownstone where we roll around and talk and roll around and talk, pressing body parts to body parts because sometimes that’s enough. And then he reminds me of who is hanging over us: the beautiful homecoming queen or aspiring model who never ventures uptown or fiancée back in Charlotte. He says I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I really shouldn’t until bam he lets go and says she would probably be fine with us having sex because she is a very open girl and in that moment I get mature and moral beyond my eighteen years and say this is not right, let’s just fall asleep and see how we feel in the morning. I leave before he wakes up and do the walk of shame through Lincoln Center with my smeared mascara and the previous night’s carefully chosen dress, feeling like the best person in the world because I’ve saved his relationship. I power through the forty blocks home with my light coffee and a slow-building regret: why didn’t I just sleep with him because at least I’d have that.

For my second Thanksgiving away from home, I take the train to Pittsburgh to visit friends at Carnegie Mellon.

The air is bitingly cold. The landscape is bleak. The East Coast just feels fucked up.

But there is a comforting sameness to our failed romantic entanglements, our lack of focus, our existential angst. We have taken a few too many steps outside our comfortable worlds and we’re all ready to run back home to California.

Their apartment is huge, two floors perched above a pizza parlor. The kitchen is large enough to comfortably accommodate our dysfunctional group. We fumble our way through planning our first Thanksgiving dinner. Even though I have never done this before, I find myself in charge.

Before bed, I tear up the challah so that it gets stale for the next day’s stuffing. I study the map of recipes written by my mom. My entire childhood Thanksgiving experience is on paper. Mashed potatoes. Mincemeat pie. Creamed onions.

I can’t sleep. I am scared to begin.

I get up early to take the turkey out of the fridge and bring it to room temperature. I dice onions and sauté them with a stick of butter. I add celery and seasonings, the stale bread, and chicken stock. I can hear my parents’ and my grandparents’ voices. More salt. Taste. More liquid. Taste. More poultry seasoning. That’s it. Now stop. The bread will soften. The turkey juices will flavor the stuffing. Don’t overdo it.

I carefully separate the turkey skin from the flesh, making room for slices of cold butter. I press the stuffing in both ends of the bird, sew it all up with large scrappy stitches, and wrap the string a few extra times around the ends of the drumsticks. Just in case. I don’t want a blowout. And then I tie a knot and hope for the best. It all feels very fragile, intimate.

But I don’t know when it’s done. How long it should rest. How to carve it. What’s safe. What’s dangerous. All the things that aren’t written down on the recipe pages. I call my parents with questions every hour until the turkey is on the kitchen table.

He buzzes me in.

I walk up the lopsided stairs, hearing the clanking of dishes from each apartment, smelling three floors of family dinners.

He doesn’t know that I have been crushing on him for weeks, following him around school, getting as close as I can on the stairs, trying to hear what he is listening to on his Walkman, once almost reaching out and touching his shirt.

He is waiting in the open door. I slip past him. I already love his faded Levi’s, his white T-shirt, his smell.

There is no table, no bed. There are no chairs. Just French movie posters on the walls, a futon, a jar of tomato sauce in the kitchenette, a pile of Doc Martens in the corner, a stack of The New York Times that comes up to my knees.

I feel unsteady from the steaming furnace, the tilting floorboards, my racing heart.

We get stoned and watch The Big Blue, a movie with dolphins and deep-sea diving and Rosanna Arquette. Halfway through, he pauses the VCR.

Are you hungry, Phyllis?

I sit on the floor and watch him melt fourteen cloves of finely chopped garlic into olive oil. As he pours the jar of tomato sauce into the hot oil, it splatters up the white high-gloss kitchenette wall. He sets the floor with black plastic place mats and carefully folded cloth napkins.

The snow blows sideways past the windows. We fall asleep back to back, hands to ourselves.

Six weeks in and he is shaking.

Phyllis?

I am one large heart.

Matthew?

I get up early before dance class just to experience the in-love version of my morning routine. The sky is bluer. Cheese Danishes taste better. My grands jetés are higher.

When we’re not kissing, M and I talk about food.

We walk around the West Village and peek into the French bistros we can’t afford.

We wait in line on the Upper West Side for over an hour to eat apple pancakes, buttermilk waffles with bacon, paprika home fries, and cream biscuits with strawberry butter.

We spend a week’s worth of food money on a dozen ravioli filled with butternut squash and sage. We carefully boil the precious pillows and then drown them in garlicky tomato sauce.

I can’t get through the Juilliard lobby fast enough. I wait for the elevator with musicians, their instruments glued to their bodies.

I throw The New York Times and a pack of Marlboro Lights down on my favorite corner table in the cafeteria and pull out the crisp food section. I don’t want to read it yet because then it will be gone and I’ll have to wait for another week.

I eat the streusel top off my enormous blueberry muffin and sip my light coffee. I look out at the yellow-cab blur at the intersection of Sixty-Sixth and Broadway. The morning light makes me hopeful. I finally let myself open the food section and flip through until I find the latest restaurant review. I read it over and over again.

I head one flight up to the dance studio and start my warm-up. As I demi-plié, demi-plié, grand plié, I am thinking only about grilled monkfish and chocolate soufflés with molten centers.

I walk through Manhattan with a warm six-month-old baby strapped to my chest. I walk to stay awake. I walk because that’s what nannies do. Playing mom comes naturally to me, but parenting someone else’s child is the loneliest of boredoms. I am twenty-two.

I tell the baby my thoughts on everything. The never-ending winter. How much I love the sticky buns at the bakery on Chambers Street. How bored I am with my café job selling hazelnut coffee and oat bran muffins. How frustrated I am by the previous day’s audition.

I failed before I even walked into the room.

The tenth one I’ve been to since I graduated from Juilliard. How they pin a piece of paper to my chest. How one small group at a time, we walk out into the middle of the room. How the producers have us turn to face the back of the room so they can see the shapes of our asses.

So humiliating, little one.

Pirouettes on the right. And the left. And then they teach us the audition sequence. How I step out into the middle of the room. How my mind goes blank.

I panicked. I ran up Broadway. All the way home.

I stop under a passenger bridge that straddles two buildings and stare up at an airy loft filled with a life that I think I want.

Someday, I will have morning glories weaving up my very own fire escape.

My rocking and yammering have put the baby to sleep. I turn the corner and see models and lawyers and Wall Streeters slipping out of limos and into a restaurant. I sneak in the front door. The air smells fancy, fermented.

I leave before anyone sees me and go around to the back. Cooks slip out to lean against the brick wall, to take quick drags of cigarettes. They all seem rushed and guilty. Each opening of the kitchen door lets me sneak a peek into their bright world.

I watch an army of cooks in crisp white shirts and aprons, red-faced, sweating, barking out orders, heads down, arms reaching and stirring, plucking herbs and flipping fish and testing sauces with tasting spoons.

The industrial kitchen fan pumps a mash-up of lunch fumes out into the alley.

I want my hair to smell like chocolate and garlic and fish.

I want to lean in and carefully place the roasted beets next to the potato purée.

I want a purpose.

I rock the baby, hugging him tight, his back to my belly. All I want is to unstrap him, hand him to the next person walking by, enter the kitchen, and never look back.

M and I have been together for three years. For my twenty-third birthday, we indulge in a four-hour restaurant marathon of Belon oysters, rabbit, pigeon and foie gras wrapped in Savoy cabbage, quince purée, eggplant and goat cheese terrine, wild striped bass, monkfish, lobster with vanilla bean, sweetbreads, snippy discussions about the actress who keeps leaving M poems on the drama board, venison, potato purée, crème fraîche, balsamic reduction, quark and chocolate and passion fruit soufflés, a solo walk around the block, crème brûlée, angry tears, pine nut tarts, Concord grape and chocolate sorbets, hand-holding, prune Armagnac and vanilla bean ice creams, the tracing of M’s life lines on his palm, three tiers of petit fours, homemade chocolates, more tears, Sauternes, a staggering bill.

We cab home. I try to kiss M. He says he might throw up on me. He is so full. I am so altered.

M guides my body down until the back of my head rests in his lap. I bend my knees and tuck my feet under me. Midtown flashes by. He gently drags his fingers through my hair. I tell him I want to be a chef.

When my grandmother Phyllis is working full-time toward her Ph.D. in psychology, my mom does much of the cooking. She is seventeen.

She and my grandmother mutually mark up the margins of Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. TOO RICH. ADD EXTRA VANILLA. LESS SUGAR. MORE SALT. DON’T OVERMIX. GREAT RECIPE! GOOD FOR A LARGE GROUP. BLAND.

Every day, after work at the café, I continue cooking my way through Lindsey Shere’s Chez Panisse Desserts, Julia Child’s The Way to Cook, The Culinary Institute of America Cookbook, and Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible.

On the weekends, I volunteer at a French bakery, writing down everything I see and hear.

Wait for the flourless chocolate cakes to rise, drop, and then crack.

Warm the egg whites before beating for greater volume.

Wait for the sponge cake to pull away from the sides of the sheet pan.

The lemon cake is done if it springs back when you press it with your finger.

Knock on the bread to see if it sounds hollow.

I think I am ready for a restaurant kitchen.

I am in the way.

Hot behind you.

Everyone is yelling.

Coming through. On your left.

It’s my first day as a pastry assistant at a large restaurant that has one of the busiest lunch services in Midtown. Lawyers and agents fill the tables. Arugula salads and chicken breasts stuffed with goat cheese fill their plates.

Pick. Up. Pick up now. And eighty-six the foie.

While plating desserts, the Pastry Chef tells me what to do.

When you’re done with lunch service, please bake off the chocolate chip cookies. You will need to peel and core a minimum of twenty apples a day. I’ll talk you through the tarte tatin when we have a little more time. For the ice cream custard, you’ll find the chinois and the bain-marie downstairs by the walk-in. Oh, and the 10x is in the pantry next to the linens. Oui, Chef! VIP desserts coming up. Pick up table ten!!!! Fuck. I need some runners. Would you bring me a few hotel pans? Someone keeps taking my stash.

I don’t understand.

Read off the dupes for me, will you? I want to make sure we have enough cheesecake to get through service. How many all day?

I am panicking.

How. Many. Cheesecakes.

She points to the tickets that are lined up above the pastry station.

I try to decipher the scribbles. Five cheesecakes?

She double-checks the orders.

Five. Yes. All day. That’s right. You should put your hair back or Chef will say something inappropriate. Buy some boots or clogs. Something with a hard toe. Knives fall.

She yells to the dishwasher: Por favor. Can you wash tres sheet pans? For the new girl. She has a thousand cookies to make. Gracias. Oh, and Phyllis, please chop these pecans while I get some family meal. You want some? Looks pretty decent today.

I ask where I can find the knives to chop the nuts.

You don’t have your own knives?

I stop asking questions.

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